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TV Viewing Linked to Attention Problems
oDDmON oUT writes "While your mother may have told you that sitting too close to the TV was bad for your eyes, the folks over at New Scientist are reporting that too much television may be linked to a bad attention span 'The study is not proof that TV viewing causes attention problems, Landhuis notes, because it may be that children prone to attention problems may be drawn to watching television. "However, our results show that the net effect of television seems to be adverse."'"
I am an avid TV watcher and have no problems pa...
Oh look a bunny!
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
Gosh, you mean watching Tv with 1/2 second shots changing quickly will shorten my attention span? What's next, water that gets you wet?
Cemil.
And in related news, scientists are reporting the polar ice caps are cold.
The phrase 'Boob tube' was coined long before late night Cinemax was available.
Everybody and their dog has been talking about this for the last few years, so I'm not sure that this is really 'news'. My wife and I try to keep our daughter from watching too much TV, and limiting what she does watch to Sprout. Sometimes, though, you just need the services of the electronic babysitter to keep your sanity.
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
Maybe you should be sent to concentration camp... you know... to learn to concentrate.
I was wondering why it is that back in the 1950's you never heard about people having attention problems. I know doctors have learned a lot about attention problems since the 1950's but you can still tell based on grades, interest in social activities etc. We may have not had a name for it in the 50's but if it was around it would have been documented. But now it just seams that cases of ADD and ADHD are just popping up all over the place. Could it be that parents are no longer at home? The dad does not get the joys of working 9-5 and coming home to his wife and dinner like in leave it to beaver? So the kid spends a lot of time away from their parents because the parents are at work. So the child must think up new ways to entertain them self and it just spirals out of control and the brain tricks the child into always wanting to daydream? So naturally the child sits in front of the TV and that just spurs the imagination, but maybe the imagination should only be used so much before it is always on. So if you think of the your imagination as downloading an mp3, and getting caught as ADHD. If you download one song you will probably be ok. If you download songs 24/7 you will probably get caught.
I smoked pot once. But I DID NOT inhale. Will you hire me?
CHAIRMAN: ...Which brings us once again to the urgent realization of just how much there is still left to own. Item six on the agenda: the meaning of life. Now, uh, Harry, you've had some thoughts on this.
...has anyone noticed that building there before?
HARRY:
That's right. Yeah, I've had a team working on this over the past few weeks, and, uh, what we've come up with can be reduced to two fundamental concepts. One: people are not wearing enough hats. Two: matter is energy. In the universe, there are many energy fields which we cannot normally perceive. Some energies have a spiritual source which act upon a person's soul. However, this soul does not exist ab initio, as orthodox Christianity teaches. It has to be brought into existence by a process of guided self-observation. However, this is rarely achieved, owing to man's unique ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia.
[pause]
BERT:
What was that about hats, again?
HARRY:
Oh, uh, people aren't wearing enough.
CHAIRMAN:
Is this true?
EDMUND:
Certainly. Hat sales have increased, but not pari passu, as our research initially--
BERT:
But when you say 'enough', enough for what purpose?
GUNTHER:
Can I just ask, with reference to your second point, when you say souls don't develop because people become distracted,...
[rumble]
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
so here is a bunny with a pancake on its head
I'll believe this when I see more unbiased studies come out with the same conclusion under the same factors. For people whom don't know, just because one study's result points towards a corilation doesn't mean that to hold as truth. The study has to be replicated several times over and should be done by different scientist each time under the same conditions. If the results of each study are the same, then maybe they are on to something, otherwise as 1st post says move on nothing to see here.
Wouldn't video games be the obvious cure to TV induced ADD? Most video games require hours of dedication and concentration to finish. I suppose those with ADD will be more attracted to ADD games (almost anything on the wii right now). So in the interest of public health we should promote the playing videos games that aren't shitty mini game collections.
Save a mind, ban wario ware.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Yep. It's nowhere near new. I used data like this in a speech I had to do in public speaking around 1979 in high school. When I worked in Special Ed, many teachers had noticed that the kids who talked more about TV were the ones that tended to have less of an attention span. There's a lot of experience that leads one to believe that kids that watch too much TV tend to have an attention span that's about 10-15 minutes, or the length of time between commercials.
On the other hand, I've seen a huge number of kids who are supposedly ADD or ADHD show an amazing attention span when they sit down with a copy of Harry Potter. It makes me wonder if part of the problem with attention spans in school is due to inappropriate expectations for a child's age and boring teachers that just don't have the skills teachers did in years past.
All programming to be broadcast in ADHDTV by 2007
Monstar L
When I was a kid I watched a TON of television and I have an incredibly long attention span. I can sit and write code for hours. Or work on music for hours (piano, guitar, synths, audio workstation). I can have a long conversation on a particular subject (over dinner, in the car, etc...). My average viewing day at age three during the week was:
7:00AM-11:00AM (Cartoons, Little Rascals, Brady Bunch)
3:00-5:00PM (Rin-Tin-Tin, more Little Rascals, The Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, Looney Toons, etc...)
7:00PM-9:00PM (Anything my folks watched which could have been Star Trek, Hogan's Heroes, any number of 70s cop shows and of course the news occasionally in the 6:00-7:00PM time slot.
Weekends were usually:
7:00AM- 12:00PM (Cartoons)
1:00PM-5:00PM (Local hosted movies "Superhost" in Cleveland)
6:00PM-7:00PM (Star Trek)
8:00PM-11:00PM (Any number of "family shows" in the 70s, Love Boat and Fantasy Island on Saturday nights, and maybe a movie on Sunday nights)
It had no impact on my attention span.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
...is a learned skill as well. Everyone that's worked in a cubicle or "open landscape", learn how to tune out most (if not all of it). Find a farmer or lumberjack and place him there and he'll go crazy with all the chattering until he learns. If you got zero attention span, the TV is also the easy way out, it's a constant series of impressions to keep you sitting there. You don't have to actually learn to sit down and get some attention span.
Then again, I rarely get to do that at work either. If I had a single checklist of things to do, and could work my way down then all would be well. Instead it's definately got multitasking, I'd say at times multithreading, preemption and there's always someone trying to hog the scheduler. I make it sound all bad but I don't really feel it that way - but it's definately not for the really long attention spans.
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Views on TV and attention span
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You really need an attention deficiency problem to watch most TV these days.
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Views on TV and attention span
I've tried watching stuff like Myth Busters that I downloaded, and it seems like it's not designed to be watched as a program, but rather byte sized pieces.
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Compare that presentation style with that of the BBC, where the documentary is actually intended to fill an hour time slot with no ad breaks. In some circumstanced this kind of TV will help kids to focus on one subject for a longer period of time.
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Another view on TV and attention span
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated up.
I HATE how people call it attention deficit "disorder" and how they say the net effect is "averse".
screw you, I am happy with my short attention span. It serves me financially and personally to have a "short attention span".
Because I VALUE MY TIME(short attention span) more than other people, I am more efficient and I deal with less bullshit because I don't want to. Call it a disorder if you want, I call it an evolutionary advantage.
TV makes people dumb in lots of different ways. This really isn't surprising. What is really interesting how relatively recently TV used to be a ubiquitous thing that a large majority of people consumed, and today there are large percentages of intelligent people simply dumping TV altogether. In another 10 years, TV (broadcast, cable, etc.) viewers will probably be even more disproportionately uneducated compared to the rest of the population.
I don't respond to AC's.
Why?
Because parents who let their kids stay in front of a TV for hours on end are not teaching their kids responsibility. All they are teaching is selfishness and the like. I say this because I have seen ADD kids do just fine playing games for hours on, its because they want to do it. ADD is just an excuse for not teaching a child that there is a time and place for everything. Its because you don't take an active interest in what they are doing, as such they do not know what to place importance on. Don't claim they don't know how to focus , the do damn well when its what they want to do.
Occupy their time. Involve them. You would be amazed at the difference between children of parents who actively engage them throughout the day and those that don't. I bet you can tell which children are which. ADD should renamed ARD - Adult Responsibility Disorder.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I don't have scientific proof or anything but I'm convinced that editing styles are proof of shrinking attention spans. You watch older shows and movies, you get lingering scenes, sometimes sticking with a camera for a minute or three before going to the next one. Now you can't even watch a live performance of anything without the camera operators trying to give you motion sickness. Ok, camera tracking overhead, cut to floor camera zooming in, cut to camera far in back to show the audience but make sure it's panning like they're trying to track a blue angels fly-by, puke! Slow the hell down, let me take it in.
Now some people might say that digital nonlinear editing makes it easier for people to go crazy with the cuts, the same way novice web designers go crazy with animated gifs and horrible fonts. (thank god blink is redacted.) But I'm thinking it's more about keeping short attention spans engaged.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
You know, they don't call it the lobotomy box for nothing.
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
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If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
Whoever modded this comment flamebait either isn't being very honest or isn't a parent.
While the comment drifts a bit, the basic idea is right on. The problem of short attention spans begins with parents letting the TV babysit their child.
Limited and structured television is fine. We use it to watch movies, travel shows and other stuff as a family, for a finite amount of time not to exceed the length of a movie or the television show. Why? Because there should be something to talk/laugh about afterwards. If it can't pass that simple test, it's time wasted.
Does my kid still ask to watch TV? Yes, she's a kid. But she's got other options including doing kid-parent stuff.
Step 1 to eliminating tv is getting rid of the giant screen whatever and getting a 17" or less and putting it in a cabinet that closes so it's not around.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Ever watch Animal planet "Most Extreme..." It has some interesting facts, and I'm glad they make Science appealing for kids, BUT they repeat the same facts over and over again. Think maybe ADD is a defense mechanism for boredom... I can see it in the kid's head now "Oh the announcer guy will just repeat what he just said 5 times so I'll just veg out until after the next commercial break."
...instead of being a separate entity it is a symptom of something else?
I just throw that up for discussion, because I have many of the hallmarks of ADD.. can't sit still, fidget, must always be doing *something*, had a devil of a time "paying attention" at the spoonfed crap at school..
Is it possible all that jazz is linked to something else, like, say, bi-polar disorder? Because *that* one the docs are fairly sure I got.
Is it further possible that the idiot box had a big hand in developing that?
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
It has NOTHING to do with the skills of teachers. It's a problem with our expectations of what our educational system should provide, and a dearth of parental influence. Somewhere along the line, we decided that introducing Algebra and the history of Pre-Columbian Meso-American fishing cultures to third graders was a wonderful idea, and that we needed to test for every piece of trivia that any expert thought our 10th graders should know. Meanwhile, mommy and daddy both work until 6:30 pm, and barely have time to check if the kids have finished their 4 hours of homework per night.
When my son finishes high school, I want him to be self-sufficient. That means being capable of researching any topic, writing a concise summary of what he's found out and advocating his own opinion on the subject. That means balancing a checkbook and calculating how much wood he'll need to build fence. That means being able to reason his way through a natural disaster, and walk 5 miles to the nearest gas station when his car breaks down. That also means controlling his own emotions well enough to smile and wave at road-ragers. The rest, I am confident, he will get from my wife and I, and fill in for himself, based upon natural human curiosity and ambition.
Let's get the trivial pursuit tests out of our schools and give our kids the chance to take responsibility for their own future. America's aptly titled "greatest generation" grew up in the depression helping their families make ends meet, and their kids grew up on howdy-doody, and took us to the moon with slide rules. We're not going to get back to that by cramming more powerpoint presentations and multiple choice tests down our kids' throats. We're going to get back there by restoring single paycheck families and giving families the time to do something BESIDES watch TV for an hour before bedtime.
"Don't you know you're going to shock the monkey?"- Peter Gabriel
Main points:
1. Watching a lot of TV changes the way your brain works.
2. Those changes leave TV watchers with significantly less ability to think through complex problems.
3. As a direct result, we elect morons like George W. Bush who lead us into disasterously stupid wars.